thinking about learning

In my teacher days the issue of learning came up quite a bit. What do you understand as learning? How does learning happen? What is learning? How do you help someone to learn? I remember that in my role of 'curriculum officer' in my department we were tasked with helping lecturers try to connect their understandings or philosophies of learning with their teaching practice and to make these philosophies visible. In my teaching portfolio I too had to do a similar task - suggest what my philosophy of learning was and how my teaching approaches tried to match it.

Now I'm the learner and I have teachers who I guess are going through similar processes as I've outlined above in relation to my learning and their teaching. But as the learner I've also been thinking about my own learning, my learning during this PhD process. So how am I learning, what am I learning, what helps my learning, what hinders my learning, how does supervision help me to learn, how does talking about my research help me to help, how does writing help me to learn, what do I need to learn? Am I learning? These are such deeply personal, yet abstract, conceptual questions - open to interpretation, open to multiple, yet, valid responses or answers. I feel that at some level, yes, I can answer these questions, but at another, maybe personal, internalised, level I don't really know. Learning is not the same thing all the time - different contexts mean you learning differently, or need different things to help you learn, sometimes you learn unhelpful things too.

Accounting for what I've learnt at this point in the PhD process is a scary thing for me, while I know I'm learning I can't seem to quantify what exactly it is that I've been learning or exactly what it is I need to learn. I wonder also if I am learning but just haven't found a way to 'show', 'express', 'demonstrate' this learning in a way that I recognise and my teachers and peers recognise in the same way.

Yesterday when I was mulling over these points and wondering if indeed I had the necessary cognitive capacity to learn in the ways I think are expected of me, SLP pointed out that what your PhD experience is meant to highlight or affirm IS your able to learn and grapple with really complex issues. And I don't mean in terms of the social or status related recognition you get because you can craft a 100 000 word text, conforming to some or other prescription (I'm being a bit disparaging and dismissive here, when I do really appreciate the effort, on all fronts needed, to produce a PhD thesis) or turning you into an arrogant prick filled with self importance because you know a lot about a really small area of knowledge. But rather the PhD experience is meant to affirm and support this idea that you are learning (in all its glorious and most positive connotations) and that you have the capacity to learn in very tangible ways (even though it is within the very specific contextual reality of the PhD), rather than filling you with self-doubt.